As the Flyers entered Game 5 of their playoff series with the Penguins on Friday night Chris Pronger wasn’t even an apparition floating over the proceedings

PITTSBURGH — It was cold that day in Winnipeg, really cold, and the Philadelphia Flyers didn’t have many places to go, so if you were in the same hotel you saw them everywhere. The mall beneath the Fairmont hotel, at Portage and Main; the Earl’s down the street, where a group of them lined the bar for dinner, eating with their backs to the crowd. And the most recognizable one was Chris Pronger, wearing a tan overcoat, tall and lean, his back unnaturally straight, his blond hair slicked back. He seemed to be leading the pack.

That was the last time, though. Pronger played an afternoon game in Winnipeg on Nov. 19 and has not played since. His concussion was deemed so severe that the club ruled the future Hall of Fame defenceman out for the season in December. So as the Flyers entered Game 5 of their playoff series with the Pittsburgh Penguins on Friday night — a series where defensive play had been aspirational, and not much else — Chris Pronger wasn’t even an apparition floating over the proceedings. His symptoms, when they are reported, sound slow to improve.

“I can say that he’s probably had some good days, where three or four months ago he wasn’t having very many good days,” says Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren, who talks to Pronger once or twice a week. “We want to see Chris recover because he has two young sons and a young daughter and a beautiful wife, and those are the most important things in his life. And if he plays again for us, then good.”

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Players come and go in sports, but in Pronger’s case it is almost like he vanished into the air. He made an appearance at the team Christmas party; he exchanges occasional texts with teammates, and has been watching video on behalf of the coaching staff.

“He checks in with them from time to time about how the team is playing,” Holmgren says. “He’s a smart man, he’s a smart player. He sees a lot of things that maybe we don’t.”

But he has not come to the games, because it would be too much in all kinds of ways. Pronger made his lone post-concussion appearance at Philadelphia’s playoff-clinching game March 25 in owner Ed Snider’s box, wearing glasses and a beard. He was given a powerful ovation, and his teammates, led by Jaromir Jagr, waved from the bench. But the visit did not go well.

“It bothered him,” Holmgren says. “With the lights, with the noise, but also, it’s emotional. And I know watching the playoff games, it’s really emotional. There’s nowhere else he’d rather be. He hasn’t been able to do a whole lot — maybe he’s got a padded room at home.”

For all his snarl, his prickliness, his nasty streak that, on the ice, could be a genuine menace — in the NHL’s fractious spring, one can only imagine Pronger would have already had a hearing with Brendan Shanahan — the angry man from Dryden, Ont., was going to have to be dragged away from this game. He was.

“It’s definitely weird — he is a big part of that team,” says Pittsburgh’s Arron Asham, who played with the Flyers from 2008-10. “I think it’s better for us that he’s not playing. There’s not too many Chris Prongers out there. [Braydon] Coburn’s stepped up for them and he’s played pretty well, but there’s only one Prongs.”

There may soon be none, at least in the National Hockey League. At 37, Pronger’s body had already begun to break down — he missed 32 games in 2010-11, including the last three in Philadelphia’s second-round series with Boston, in which the Flyers were swept. But as this season began, his balky back was feeling good.

And then Mikhail Grabovski’s follow-through caught him just above the eye on Oct. 24; Pronger later said his head went numb and he could not see. He was out for just over two weeks, and in his fourth game back, his head was driven into the boards by Phoenix’s Martin Hanzal, who is as tall as Pronger but outweighs him by perhaps 20 pounds. Pronger tried to carry on in Winnipeg, but that was it. He played what might have been the final 13 games of a 1,167-game career and was, by necessity, left behind.

“Last year he was in and out for most of the season; you start getting mentally prepared to not have him in the lineup,” says his old defence partner, Matt Carle. “This year I think it was almost easier to deal with him, with them making that announcement [that Pronger was out], because then you knew for sure, you could mentally prepare for him to not be back at all this season. So I think that makes it easier because we weren’t going to be speculating all year on when he was going to be back.”

He is not a part of this team, not any more. The team’s young players have barely heard him yell at them; the older players have assumed leadership roles. The Flyers are a marvellously constructed team, built to contend, even without Chris Pronger.

But they would be better with him, and he would likely be better with them. In January, his wife Lauren told CSNPhilly.com, “It’s a tough go at home. We’re going day-to-day right now. Good days, bad days. It’s been a lot of trauma. We’re just praying right now. He’s battling. He wants to be out there, more than anybody. It’s tough for all of us to watch and go through.”

When asked about their two sons she said, “They’re confused all the time. ‘Dad, when can we go to a game? Dad, when are you going to play?’ He just looks at them and says, ‘Please don’t ask that question.’ ”

Pronger recently travelled to Lake Placid to see his sons play in a hockey tournament there, but nobody knows if they will be able to do the same for him. As Asham puts it, “He’s one of the hardcore, physical, in-your-face, tough defencemen there was. Definitely.”

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